The Blog of Theology and Questions

Saturday, December 20, 2014

The Beginning of God

Where did God come from? The answer: He's always existed.

This certainly feels like a cop-out answer but it's not.

One of the difficulties in talking about time is that our language is permeated with time signatures. Past, present, and future tense give words a sense of history. So the answer "God has always existed" includes the past tense "has" which begs the question: When did that start? It's slightly better to say "God exists" ... or "I AM" ... or "He is, and was, and is to come."

But time is a fascinating thing in itself, manipulated by travel and gravity; ultimately, however, it is a human measurement of change. If we conceive of a reality with no change, none whatsoever, there would be no time. Since God does not change, He would be outside of time. Creation was the start of time with the introduction of change.

Even so, all that seems to be ignoring the question. But the question applies equally to a naturalistic view of the world as well: Where did all this stuff -- matter/energy -- come from? Given a starting point, we can see how history unfolds. From what I've gathered, if we had an infinite timeline going in both directions, it would be impossible to get to today (I don't fully understand the argument, but it sounds fascinating). So we must turn the eternal line in on itself, forming a circle -- the cyclical view of history. There have been a few cultures who hold to this circular view of time; several years ago, for example, the Mayan calendar was said to predict the end of the world, when, in reality, it just reached the end and started over. Our own calendar is like this too, rolling to January 1st in the new year.

Still, an infinite universe could easily be the answer, perpetually expanding, collapsing, exploding again and again.

The question for me, however, is which makes more sense: An unchanging, eternal God outside of time; or an eternal, constantly in flux universe?